This book offers introductory-to-advanced material on all major aspects of multimedia, including pointers to current links for information and demos at the most advanced level, to form a complete reference.Topics covered include introduction to multimedia, graphics/image data representations, color models in images and video, basics of digital audio, lossy compression, image compression standards, basic video compression techniques, basic audio compression techniques, multimedia networks, and more.For professionals involved in Computer-Aided Engineering, Computer Systems Organization, Computer-Communication Networks, Computing Methodologies, Coding and Information Theory, or anyone interested in a good reference on current multimedia technologies.

A course in multimedia is rapidly becoming a necessity in computer science and engineering curricula, especially now that multimedia touches most aspects of these fields. Multimedia was originally seen as a vertical application area; that is, a niche application with methods that belong only to itself. However, like pervasive computing, multimedia is now essentially a horizontal application area and forms an important component of the study of computer graphics, image processing, databases, real-time systems, operating systems, information retrieval, computer networks, computer vision, and so on. Multimedia is no longer just a toy but forms part of the technological environment in which we work and think. This book fills the need for a university-level text that examines a good deal of the core agenda computer science sees as belonging to this subject area. Multimedia has become associated with a certain set of issues in computer science and engineering, and we address those here.The book is not an introduction to simple design issues--it serves a more advanced audience than that. On the other hand, it is not a reference work--it is more a traditional textbook. While we perforce discuss multimedia tools, we would like to give a sense of the underlying principles in the tasks those tools carry out. Students who undertake and succeed in a course based on this text can be said to really understand fundamental matters in regard to this material; hence the title of the text.In conjunction with this text, a full-fledged course should also allow students to make use of this knowledge to carry out interesting or even wonderful practical projects in multimedia, interactive projects that engage and sometimes amuse and, perhaps, even teach these same concepts. Who Should Read This Book?This text aims at introducing the basic ideas in multimedia to an audience comfortable with technical applications--that is, computer science and engineering students. It aims to cover an upper-level undergraduate multimedia course but could also be used in more advanced courses and would be a good reference for anyone, including those in industry, interested in current multimedia technologies. Graduate students needing a solid grounding in materials they may not have seen before would undoubtedly benefit from reading it.The text mainly presents concepts, not applications. A multimedia course, on the other hand, teaches these concepts and tests them but also allows students to use coding and presentation skills they already know to address problems in multimedia. The accompanying web site shows some of the code for multimedia applications, along with some of the better projects students have developed in such a course and other useful materials best presented electronically. The ideas in the text drive the results shown in student projects. We assume the reader knows how to program and is also completely comfortable learning yet another tool. Instead of concentrating on tools, however, we emphasize, what students do not already know. Using the methods and ideas collected here, students are also able to learn more themselves, sometimes in a job setting. It is not unusual for students who take the type of multimedia course this text aims at to go on to jobs in a multimedia-related industry immediately after their senior year, and sometimes before.The selection of material in the text addresses real issues these learners will face as soon as they show up in the workplace. Some topics are simple but new to the students; some are more complex but unavoidable in this emerging area. Have the Authors Used This Material in a Real Class?Since 1996, we have taught a third-year undergraduate course in multimedia systems based on the introductory materials set out in this book. A one-semester course could very likely not include all the material covered in this text, but we have usuall